All posts in Uncategorized

Google Search Console’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) report will now differentiate between critical and non-critical errors.

The post Google Search Console Update: Critical & Non-Critical AMP Errors by @MattGSouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

Read More »

So, you’ve developed an amazing site. You’ve put together some seriously valuable content, iterated on the design, and gathered a ton of feedback. Now, you’re finally feeling ready to share it with the world.

And as soon as you publish your new site for the world to see, all of your content will immediately start showing up in Google, right?

Well, maybe. Although, it takes a little more than just hitting the publish button. To get your site listed, you’ll need to check a few boxes first. Let’s walk through it …

How Google Finds Your Content

Google, in its own words, uses a huge set of computers to crawl billions of pages on the web. This crawler, called the Googlebot, essentially begins with a list of web page URLs generated from previous crawls and then augments those pages with sitemap data provided within Google Search Console. During the crawling process, the Googlebot looks for new sites, updates to existing pages, and any broken links.

If new pages are within your sitemap, Google will discover them and crawl the content and then potentially list the page within search results based on its evaluation of 200+ criteria.

Once the crawling process is completed all of the results are fed into Google’s index, and any new sites or updated content will be listed accordingly. During the processing of results, Google looks at information on your page such as title tags, meta description, alt tags, and more. If you have dynamic content on a page, the Googlebot may not be able to read it and will crawl the default version — it’s recommended that your default version is optimized for search.

As a result of Google’s crawling, you may never need to submit your website as it will be discovered automatically. The downside to this approach has always been that it’s reliant on Google’s timeframe to crawl and index your site content, which may not happen as quickly as you would like.

Want to check if a particular site is listed in Google? Just begin your search with “Site:Sitename.com.” For example, here’s what is displayed in Google for HubSpot.com:

If no content is indexed yet for a site, Google will let you know that your search did not match any results.

If no content is found, your next step should be to create a sitemap that can be submitted to Google.

If you want more information about how to create a sitemap, take a look at this post.

(HubSpot customers: Your sitemap is automatically generated and maintained. Simply go to yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml to see it.)

How Long Does It Take to Index Content?

My colleague Casey Henry wondered this very question and ran a test to see how long it took Yahoo and Google to crawl and index content. The results? Well, they were staggering.

When publishing content without manually submitting an updated sitemap, Henry found that it took Google 1,375 minutes to crawl, while Yahoo took 1,773 minutes. To put those numbers into perspective, that’s roughly a full-day just to crawl your content.

Source: Moz

On the other hand if you are launching a new website, or adding a number of new pages, it may be worth submitting an updated sitemap. According to the same study, Henry found that after submitting an updated sitemap, the average time it took for a bot to visit the page was 14 minutes, compared to 245 minutes for Yahoo. In other words, your new page can start generating organic traffic and conversions on the same day.

Source: Moz

How Do I Submit My Site to Google?

If you have a brand new site, you should first verify you own the site within Google Search Console and then submit it here.

If you have an existing site and are launching a number of new pages, then instead you should submit an updated sitemap to ensure it gets listed as quickly as possible.

To submit an updated sitemap, log in to Google Search Console > Crawl tab > Sitemaps. Once you’re there you can submit your updated sitemap for Google so it can begin crawling it as soon as possible.

Based on the above, you may be asking if you need to submit an updated sitemap every time you publish a page. While you certainly could do so, it’s best to manually go through the submission process if you’re working with critically important content that needs to be indexed quickly. If you’re just making minor updates or corrections to pages, then it may be ok to wait until Google crawls that page and updates its index.

Do you generally submit an updated sitemap when you publish new content? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Read More »

For brands to stay relevant in our fast-paced, mobile and multi-channel world, they must show more value, more novelty, and more values than ever before. The traditional marketing of old — TV commercials, catalogs and most importantly word of mouth, are still very relevant today. Consumer attention, even a second of it, is worth more than gold today, and consumers feel this.

Because of this pressure cooker of demand for their attention, consumers actually appreciate this more traditional type of marketing. The “slow” movements of today — slow food and slow travel, for example — are in reaction to the rapid-fire pace of modern consumer life. Traditional branding and marketing are the “slow marketing” of today, allowing brands and consumers to take a step back in time to a simpler consumer-brand relationship.

With that being said, we are now in a different time — the era of AI, VR and chatbots. If a brand exclusively relies on old school marketing, they run the risk of becoming irrelevant, stale or out of touch. The smart digital marketing, or marketing technology of today can actually help brands position themselves to be at the forefront in their industries.

Marketing Technology

Martech, shorthand for MARketing TECHnology, are tools that assist marketing professionals in reaching their target audience and marketing goals. These platforms can take the form of email marketing, inbound or outbound marketing, social media marketing, marketing automation, or customer data platforms. Some martech platforms strive to be all-in-one tools, whereas many others perform specific tasks such as user segmentation or landing page optimization. Martech’s use of AI and machine learning actually helps brands connect better emotionally with consumers, touching an important nerve that gives them an edge.

A marketing strategy that combines these two approaches is what really works. Covering all bases ensures a far-reaching approach that can gain all types of consumers, young and old, high-tech and low. Nordstrom, 1-800-Flowers.com and Sephora are three brands that have a well-rounded, varied marketing strategy that utilizes traditional marketing with the new martech to reach impressive heights with ROI, brand awareness and brand loyalty.

Let’s first take a look at how the luxury department store brand Nordstrom pairs its century-old traditional values with 21st century technology.

Nordstrom

Nordstrom, the beloved brand that is most known for its all-star customer service, exemplifies the marketing marriage between old school and new by maintaining its core value set while experimenting with new marketing and e-commerce technology.

Nordstrom opened its doors over a century ago, and has reigned as a customer favorite ever since. They are currently number one in customer satisfaction according to a wide-ranging Market Force survey. Their customer service reputation and brand loyalty is what sets them apart. They are known for a liberal and generous return policy; on the Nordstrom.com website, it states, “We handle returns on a case-by-case basis with the ultimate objective of making our customers happy.” There is no time limit for returns per se, and shopping is a full and pleasant experience. Nordstrom’s traditional marketing also includes the monthly Nordstrom catalog and Nordstrom credit card points.

Their new school marketing approach includes a Nordstrom branded app, their website with extensive user generated content and reviews, and their forward-thinking Pinterest buyable pins.

Let’s dig into each.

Pinterest Buyable Pins

Pinterest announced last year that users would be able to purchase pins directly on the platform. Nordstrom was one of the large retail brands to get on board. This is a way for a consumer to securely purchase the ‘pin’ or item they are interested in, directly on Pinterest without having to leave the platform.

User-Generated Content

Nordstrom.com has built up a robust and effective review and ratings system native to it’s website. A review consists of a written section, a 5-star rating system, the option to check boxes with qualities that describe the item, a scale to note if the item runs small or large, wide or thin (for shoes). There is also an option for the user to state whether the review was helpful or not. The user can sort reviews by rating, fit and even age! Just one pair of shoes can have a thread of over 500 reviews (see below). This is a massive amount of user-generated content, for users, by users.

Nordstrom’s branded app

Available for iOS and Android, Nordstrom’s branded app allows users to shop, check to see if a selected product is in a store nearby, and a Reserve and Try in Store feature, where users can put an item on hold and go into the store to try it on. Additionally, users can take a picture of a product they like to see similar items.

Cross-selling at its finest. See shoes you like? Take a picture and find similar items you may also like.

Users can browse, shop, and purchase all within the app.

With all that said, something is working for Nordstrom.

While other department stores taking a downturn (retail insiders point to Amazon’s dominance), Nordstrom’s sales last year were at a record high of $14.1 billion, up 35% since 2011.

1-800-Flowers

Just from the company’s name, you can tell that 1-800-Flowers started off in a simpler consumer world, compared to our mobile-dominated reality of today. However, from the get-go they were early adopters of the newest technology of the time; they were one of the first retailers to use a toll-free retail phone number for direct sales, and subsequently online. And as early as 2009, they were doing e-commerce on Facebook (where they were one of the earliest adopters).

The company’s classic relationship marketing has always been paired with the latest technology. From their founding, 1-800-Flowers has relied on word of mouth recommendations and a stellar reputation with consumers while simultaneously pushing the boundaries by adopting the latest technology of the time. Jim McCann, the company’s founder, discusses personal relationships with customers as key to their marketing and business strategy: “It is critical for us to create and maintain a much deeper, engaged, and trusting relationship with the customer.”

They are known for innovating in order to make it easier and more fruitful for the customer to get what they need. They have consistently been an early adopter in the realm of e-commerce and marketing technology in order to make the customer journey easier, through channels like Facebook, their own website and integrations with other e-commerce platforms.

Let’s see how they’re doing it.

E-Commerce on Facebook

Back in 2009, 1-800-Flowers set up an e-commerce store on their Facebook page, way before anyone was doing it.

Image Source

Now, the brand’s strategy to attract a younger generation on mobile and social is working very well. Their reasonable price points also contribute to this fact.

Since April of this year, 1-800-Flowers has a Facebook chatbot that can handle full transactions. They were one of the first two retailers to launch a chatbot on Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg even used 1-800-Flowers as an example when demonstrating how the chatbots work, during the 2016 F8 conference.

Website

The 1-800-Flowers.com website is detailed, thorough and makes the customer journey very simple by offering themed arrangements sorted by occasion (i.e., Christmas, Birthday, Sympathy, etc.).

They also offer a special membership called “Celebrations Passport,” similar to “Amazon Prime” where the customer pays a set price per year and receives free shipping and a waived service charge on orders.

Integrations

Besides their Facebook chatbot, 1-800-Flowers has two other AI tools: integration with Amazon’s Alexa and IBM Watson’s concierge service, which have attracted over 10,000 users, most of them new — and young.

Amazon Alexa
1-800-Flowers got in on the Internet-of-Things action with their integration with Amazon’s Alexa, the voice-enabled personal assistant. Customers can order flowers and gifts through their mobile devices or on Amazon’s Echo (their smart speaker) by saying, “Alexa, ask 1-800-Flowers to send flowers to Mom before Christmas.” For this to happen, the customer must have a registered 1-800-Flowers account and provide the shipping and payment details beforehand.

IBM Watson
The flower brand launched a digital “concierge” service called GWYN (Gifts When You Need), right before Mother’s Day earlier this year. IBM’s Watson, an AI agent that uses machine learning to help consumers choose the perfect gift for someone, powers the service. The service is available on desktop and mobile.

It works by the customer typing something into GYWN to start the process, like, “I want to buy a birthday gift.” GYWN will then ask the customer follow-up questions to narrow down the search, such as “Is it for a female or a male? Age 25 or 30?” The more data GWYN collects over time, she becomes “smarter” and will be able to present better options to customers in the future.

Marketing software

1-800 Flowers are now using advanced martech platform Optimove, who recently announced a CRM optimization bot to help companies target their current customers better. This predictive analytics technology is key for the brand’s successful customer retention strategy. 1-800-Flowers uses this technology to present personalized deals and offers to their current customer base throughout multiple channels.

Sephora

Sephora is an innovative beauty brand that uses creativity and technology to connect with customers, while utilizing traditional marketing to stay grounded.

Sephora is popular with consumers via word of mouth recommendations — how much more old school can you get than that? Their rewards program is well-known for imbuing a traditional marketing strategy — a loyalty program — with life and personality. The program has three levels of membership based on the amount a customer purchases per year as well as a newly-introduced “Beauty Bazaar” with rewards twice per week. Rewards can range from regular beauty products to a makeover, to something over-the-top as a makeup class at Anastasia Beverly Hills.

Sephora has a cutting-edge branded app with highly interactive features, focusing on a fun and rich user experience. One Augmented Reality (AR) based feature is the “Product Try-On” (see below) where users can virtually try on beauty products like lipstick and eyelashes, to see what they would actually look like on their faces. They can then purchase the item from the app — pretty smart, right?

Sephora’s “Product Try-On” feature

Social Media

Sephora is winning at cross-channel social media. Here’s how.

Hashtags
The beauty brand has a popular hashtag that they use, #TrendingAtSephora, to market and connect with customers, even on different platforms. The tweet below highlights how the brand uses one channel — Twitter — to get traffic in another channel — Facebook — for a Facebook Live tutorial.

Learn about the next great wave of #TrendingAtSephora skincare from our experts—right now on Facebook Live: https://t.co/J2WxzkyL1e

— Sephora (@Sephora) October 6, 2016

Facebook chatbot
Sephora recently unveiled a Facebook bot that allows customers to book consultations or in-store makeovers.

The brand also just announced they will be rewarding customers with gift cards directly on social media through a partnership with CashStar, a prepaid commerce solution. This can be useful for customer brand ambassadors and customers who’ve had customer service issues.

Sephora’s mix of classic and trailblazing marketing techniques are their forte, which translates into branding success.

Find the Balance

Nordstrom, 1-800 Flowers and Sephora have done what most brands fail to do: combine time-honored marketing approaches with modern martech to ensure relevancy and a competitive edge while being respected in their industries and by consumers.

Starting with the traditional value of putting exemplary customer experience number one, while simultaneously extending their digital reach with cutting-edge e-commerce, branded apps and advanced marketing technologies, these brands find and maintain the balance. By learning from these top-tier companies on how to pair traditional marketing with new martech, companies can grow with the times while staying grounded — a feat that is challenging, yet possible.

About the Author: Shayna Smilovitz is a writer living in Tel Aviv, originally from the San Francisco Bay Area. She loves writing about the intersection between marketing, technology and culture. You can follow her on Twitter.

Read More »

The importance of SEO is undeniable. So how much does a business have to pay to achieve results? This white paper from Rowe Digital goes deep into the three key components of a good SEO program that impact the pricing for a small, medium or large SEO program: the analysis the setup ongoing maintenance and […]

The post How to budget for SEO appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Read More »

Creating content isn’t always a walk in the park. (In fact, it can sometimes feel more like trying to swim against the current.)

While other parts of business and marketing are becoming increasingly automated, content creation is still a very manual job.

That being said, there are plenty of tools out there to make creating content much easier.

Click here to download our full collection of content creation templates for blog posts, ebooks, infographics, and more.

Below, you’ll find a list of 36 fantastic tools and resources to help you research, write, edit, and design content more easily. (You’ll notice there are a lot of design tools in here — that’s because visual content is often the part of the content creation process where people get the most nervous and frustrated. So don’t worry, we’ve got a ton in there for you.)

Let’s get started.

36 Free Tools & Resources to Make Content Creation Easier
For Researchers
1) Google Drive Research Tool

Google recently added a tool to Drive that allows you to conduct Google searches without ever leaving your Drive window. All you have to do is click “Tools” from the menu bar and choose “Research” from the dropdown menu.

2) Site:search

This is a handy Google hack I use every day. Basically, it allows you to do a Google search that’s limited to a particular website.

For example, if I wanted to search HubSpot’s blog for marketing resources so I can cite one of our old blog posts, I’d do a site:search for blog.hubspot.com with the search term marketing resources. The formula for site search is site:samplewebsite.com [search query]. So my example would be site:blog.hubspot.com marketing resources.

3) Google Webmaster Tools

Doing SEO and keyword research? Your marketing software should be able to help. But if it can’t (or you’d like to augment your data), Google’s Webmaster Tools can be a great help. You can check things like the number of indexed pages on your website, submit your site to Google so you’re getting crawled and indexed, and even disavow bad inbound links. It also can give you information on search queries that have a large volume of impressions but low clickthrough rate.

Within Google Webmaster Tools, go to “Your site on the web” and choose “Search queries.” You’ll see a table showing a search query, impressions, clicks, and clickthrough rate (CTR). Comparing this data to your other analytics data can help uncover some opportunities.

4) Percentage Change Calculator

I can’t even begin to tell you how useful this little calculator is when looking for and analyzing data. Ever want to know the percentage change of two values without having to remember the formula? Simply enter the two values into this calculator, and it’ll spit out the percentage change. Trust me, you’ll want to bookmark this one.

Here are a few other handy calculators:

3-Way Percentage Calculator – Calculates answers to these questions: What is X% of Y? X is what percent of Y? X is Y% of what?
Conversion Rate Calculator – Spits out a conversion rate when you enter the total visitor count during a specific time frame and the number of times during that time frame those visitors took a specific action.
A/B Test Calculator – Works for a basic scenario with two groups of people (A & B) who get to see one version of your website and for whom you track the number of conversions or goals (purchases, downloads, clickthroughs, etc.).
ROI Calculator – Analyzes your website’s monthly sales and lead generation efforts to determine ways in which marketing efforts can be optimized.

5) Atlas

Atlas is Quartz’s data center, and it’s chock-full of graphs, charts, and data visualizations. You can search for almost any topic or keyword, and Atlas will have a graphic based on recent research data for you. This is a great tool to get background information on a topic you’re researching, or to find fresh data to use in a project you’re working on. Here’s a chart based on data from early 2016:

Source: Atlas

6) Search in a Giphy

You know that coworker who always seems to find the perfect animated GIFs for your social posts or internal chat client? With the free Giphy Chrome extension, you’ll be able to find great GIFs just as quickly.

To use the tool, all you have to do is open the extension in Chrome, search, choose a GIF, and drag and drop. So far, the tool works in Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, and more — and they’re constantly expanding support.

For Writers
7) Evernote

I use the free version of Evernote every single day. From to-do lists and research notes to writing entire chunks of articles, it’s proven helpful at every step of the writing and editing process.

One great feature? Its mobile, desktop, and web apps sync automatically as long as you have an internet connection. (And if you work offline, it’ll sync the next time you have internet.) Plus — and this is super important for content creators like us — it’s constantly saving and syncing your work automatically, making it a safe place to write and store ideas.

Use it to keep a running list of ideas, take notes, store inspiring articles or ebooks, or plan your editorial and social media publishing calendars.

8) Word2CleanHTML

If you like drafting blog posts in programs like Microsoft Word, Evernote, or Google Drive instead of your content management system (CMS), then this simple tool can be your best friend. Why? Because when you copy a document from Microsoft Office and paste it into your CMS, lots of little, weird formatting issues can crop up in your HTML.

Word2CleanHTML applies filters to fix all those things added into the HTML, resulting in well-formatted HTML you can paste directly into a web page CMS. Simply paste in your draft, click one button, and then copy the resulting HTML straight from the tool. When you paste that into your CMS (most will have buttons reading “HTML” or “</>” in their tool bar above your draft), it will appear nice and clean. No hair-pulling or swimming through code required.

9) WordCounter

There is no “right answer” for how long a blog post should be. As long as it serves its purpose — whether that’s thought leadership, driving leads, explaining a new concept, or something else — length doesn’t matter. But although we don’t recommend writing blog posts with a word count in mind, sometimes word count can come in handy. WordCounter works exactly the way you think it does: Paste in your content and it’ll spit out exactly how many words you have.

10) Cofftivity

According to a study out of the University of Chicago, “A moderate level of ambient noise is conducive to creative cognition.” In other words, being the tiniest bit distracted actually helps you be more creative. That’s why for many people, myself included, white noise helps promote focus.

There are a lot of white noise generators out there, but my favorite is Cofftivity. This particular one offers non-stop café background sounds at varying intensities, from “Morning Murmur” and “University Undertones” to “Lunchtime Lounge” and “Brazil Bistro.” It’s available on the web and as an app on iOS and Android.

11) & 12) Zerys & eLance

Need to start creating content but don’t have the bandwidth? We hear about this roadblock a lot. One way to get around it is by hiring freelancers from reputable marketplaces like Zerys or eLance. These resources give you access to skilled freelance writers who can write blog posts, ebooks, whitepapers, and other pieces of written content for you.

13) HTML Hacks for Marketers

While this isn’t strictly a writing resource, basic coding knowledge is quickly becoming a must-have skill for the modern marketer — bloggers and written content creators included. But learning from scratch can be daunting. Where on earth do you start?

If you’re a total beginner, start with HTML Hacks for Marketers, which my colleagues at HubSpot created with Codeacademy. It’ll teach you quick but useful hacks anyone — regardless of coding knowledge — can use in their marketing. For example, you’ll learn how to make small changes to HTML like altering headers and spacing, creating text in block-quote form, and inserting social share links. My personal favorite is the hack to change font colors.

Once you’ve mastered these basic HTML skills, move on to Codeacademy’s free interactive courses. They found a way to make learning HTML and CSS actually fun — and you can go through each lesson at your own pace.

14) Blog Topic Generator

If you need to get to writing blog posts but aren’t sure of an angle or title to get your creativity moving, HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator can do the work for you. Simply enter a few keywords that your blog focuses on, and the Blog Topic Generator will produce a week’s worth of titles and topic ideas for you. It might not produce the final title of your blog post, but it helps get you thinking about creative new angles for topics you’ve written about before.

Here are the blog post titles I received when I entered “content,” “inbound marketing,” and “blogging”:

15) Blog Post Templates

All blog posts aren’t created equal, but we’ve found that there are steps you can take to make your posts comprehensive and shareable. With these blog post templates, we’ll walk you through an outline to write successful how-to, listicle, newsjack, and curation blog posts. Instead of starting from scratch, you’ll save time and, hopefully, nail your blog goals.

For Content Editors
16) Editorial Calendar Template

Creating a balanced editorial calendar can be tough, especially if you don’t have one centralized calendar that you and your team can refer to. To save you time and headache, we’ve created editorial calendar templates for Google Calendar, Google Sheets, and Excel that you can fill in and share with your team to start the next month or year off on the right foot.

17) & 18) Grammarly & Correctica

While human editors will be able to catch most grammatical errors, editing tools like Grammarly and Correctica are great tools for triple-checking before you press “publish” or “send.” Both free tools check for grammatical errors — and Grammarly even checks for plagiarism.

19) Hemingway App

Ernest Hemingway, admired for his succinct writing style, is the namesake for this handy editing app. Want to make your written content easier to read? Paste your content into this free web app, and it’ll assess your writing and identify opportunities to make it simpler.

My favorite features include identifying passive voice and hard-to-read sentences. Check out the right-hand side of the screenshot below, where the tool has summed up how readable my writing is with a grade. (Some room for improvement here.) Their suggestion to improve readability overall? Shoot for lower than a 10th grade reading level.

20) Headline Analyzer

Here’s a scary stat for you: Only 60% of people who click into an article end up reading past the headline. That makes your headline both the first and possibly the only chance for you to compel readers to keep reading — so it’s totally worth it to spend the extra few minutes coming up with a really good one.

What does a really good headline look like? The free tool Headline Analyzer by CoSchedule can tell you. It scores your headline quality and rates its ability to drive social shares, traffic, and SEO value. In my experience, its strength is helping you strengthen specific components of your title. For example, it reports on perceived sentiment and commonality of word types. It’ll even show you how it will appear in search results.

So although you should take these scores and grades with a grain of salt, you can use this to give your headlines a “once-over.” (And read this blog post to learn more about writing awesome headlines.)

For Designers
21) Nimbus Screenshot

This is another tool I use every day. Sure, you can capture a screenshot of your entire screen or part of your screen using the old keyboard shortcut method. But what if you want your screenshot to include stuff that’s not visible on your screen?

Nimbus Screenshot lets you capture the visible part of a web page, a selected area, a selected scroll (my personal favorite), the entire page, or the entire browser window — including everything below the fold.

Once you’ve taken the screenshot, you can crop, edit (like adding notes and callouts), and choose to print or save to your desktop or Google Drive.

22) Canva

If you like creating beautiful visual content in a really short amount of time, you’ll love Canva. The time and resources it takes to learn design, pay for design assets, and/or get inspired to create beauty from scratch can be really difficult when you’re staring at a long list of to-dos — but Canva offers a huge library of pre-made templates and assets that you can manipulate while also adding your own imagery.

Best of all, they have so many assets and graphics available for free that you won’t have to pay a cent if you don’t want to. If you want to use more “premium” assets and graphics found through their image search, they’ll charge you $1 for each. But there’s plenty of value for free.

Here’s an example of something you could make:

23) ThingLink

Ever wanted to make an image (or infographic) clickable? ThingLink lets you upload an image and add little icons to it that appear when a person hovers their cursor over the image. These icons allow users to visit links, watch videos, or read messages you’ve written. Plus, it’s easy to share: Users can easily embed ThingLink images. (Click here for step-by-step instructions.)

Below is part of a a clickable infographic from Thinglink my colleague Ginny Mineo created for another post:

EditTouch

Source blog.hubspot.com

Source blog.hubspot.com

Source blog.hubspot.com

Source blog.hubspot.com

Source blog.hubspot.com

Source blog.hubspot.com

Source blog.hubspot.com

Source blog.hubspot.com

Source blog.hubspot.com

Source blog.hubspot.com

Source blog.hubspot.com

Source blog.hubspot.com

Source blog.hubspot.com

Source blog.hubspot.com

Source blog.hubspot.com

Source blog.hubspot.com

Source blog.hubspot.com

Source blog.hubspot.com

Made with

 

Learn more

 

Touch image

Share image…

 

24) Skitch

Skitch is a free app by Evernote that helps you communicate more visually. It lets you mark up images, digital assets, PDFs, and other files with arrows, callout boxes, text, and more all in one place.

In the example below, I opened the program on my desktop and used the “Screen Snap” button to take a screenshot of a web page — which then opened right in Skitch for editing and exporting.

Although it’s free, it does require you to open an Evernote account — but that’s also free (see above).

25) Infogram

While similar to Canva, Infogram is a visual content tool that focuses on helping you create infographics, charts, and data visualization. If you like to create charts using Microsoft Excel, you’re in luck — it also offers compatibility with Excel through Infogram Charts. Also, their infographics are responsive with mobile devices.

26) Infographic Templates

As a content marketer, you might feel more comfortable creating written content than visual content, but that’s no excuse to exclude infographics from your strategy. Visual content is growing in demand from your audience, and infographics are particularly shareable. We’ve created the backbones of 15 different templates that you can easily play around with to customize for your content and audience — here’s a sneak peek of one template, and you can grab the rest here. 

Source: 15 Free Infographic Templates in PowerPoint

27) Google Fonts

Want to spruce up your site pages, presentations, ebooks, and other content with cool and different new fonts? Little-known fact: Google has a directory of 600 free fonts ready for you to download and use.

Simply find and select the fonts you like from their directory, then click “Use” to get the HTML code you can copy and paste onto your site. Alternatively, you can download the fonts to your desktop and use them when making new marketing content by clicking “Add to Collection.” (Click here for step-by-step instructions for doing this in the HubSpot software.)

28) Image Color Picker

Remember that time you wanted to match your call-to-action design to that color you were using on all your event swag … but the one person who would know what that color was didn’t work at your company anymore? Next time that happens, snag a picture of that swag and upload it to ImageColorPicker.com, or use any image URL to do the same thing. Select any point of the picture, and immediately see its corresponding HEX, RGB, and HSV values.

29) PowerPoint Templates

Is there anything more boring than a PowerPoint presentation featuring black text on a white background? With the help of these templates, you’ll be able to put together compelling, visually appealing presentations. Whether you’re driving lead generation or reporting on your blog’s growth to your team, keep your audience’s attention with these eye-catching presentations.

30) SlideShare Templates

SlideShare doesn’t need to be daunting. You can easily create shareable, embeddable SlideShare presentations in PowerPoint with the help of these templates — no need to start from scratch or hire a freelancer. Once you’ve created your first presentation, check out our guide to marketing SlideShares successfully.

31) Haiku Deck

If you’ve ever had to create a PowerPoint or SlideShare presentation in a pinch, you’ll wish you knew about Haiku Deck. This tool helps you quickly find simple layouts, beautiful images, and great fonts. It’s available for the web and for iPad.

Want to see what one looks like? Below’s an example I pulled from their list of featured decks. Note the simplicity of the design — if you want to create super detailed slides, this may not be the right tool for you.

Snowed In? – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

32) HubSpot’s Free Stock Photos

Searching for and buying stock imagery can be a pain in the you-know-what — especially when it comes to deciphering legalese for different use cases. I have a liberal arts degree, and Nietzsche was easier to read than whatever legalese stock imagery companies tended to give me. All I wanted to know is whether to cite or not cite a stock image of a laptop. Why was it so hard?

That’s why our team decided to create a library of 550+ free and royalty-free stock photos. Whether it’s a unique image needed for an ebook or that perfect photo you want to add to a blog post, that collection should have you covered. Here’s one of our “around the kitchen” stock photos — yum.

Source: The Free Stock Photos You’ve Been Searching For

33) PlaceIt

PlaceIt serves a very specific purpose: It allows you to upload images of your site or product into real-world environments of people holding phones, tablets, and laptops. PlaceIt will automatically alter the image to make it appear natural with the angle of the phone’s screen — which will save you time learning and/or editing in more advanced software to get the angle right.

You’ll have to pay per image to get really large or high-resolution versions, though I’ve found free images work just fine for blog posts and product page content. The paid downloads also remove that PlaceIt watermark from the bottom right.

34) LICEcap

Looking for the perfect GIF to include in your blog post? If it doesn’t already exist on Giphy, you can make one yourself using LICEcap. Film a screenshot and turn it into a GIF using this handy, free tool — we use LICEcap for our blog posts, too. 

35) & 36) The Noun Project & HubSpot’s Resizable Icons Collection

Like with stock photos, another challenge content creators face is finding elegant icons that resize without getting all fuzzy. There are a few resources out there for great, resizable icons.

The Noun Project is an extensive library of thousands of icons uploaded by contributors. With a free account, you can use icons as long as you either give credit to the creator or purchase them royalty-free for $1.99 apiece.

HubSpot has a library of resizeable icons, too, which you can download for free and without any licensing or attribution. The kit comes with a free guide for how to change the color of the icons using PowerPoint, Photoshop, and Illustrator.

To that, we say …

(From HubSpot’s Free Icon Collection.)

It’s Not the Wand, It’s the Wizard

The tools and resources listed above can help you create, but it’s ultimately up to you to control the quality of your content. You still need to know your customer incredibly well, understand what challenges they face that your product or service solves, and create content that helps them address those challenges.

The brains and heart behind the content creator trump the code behind any tools and technology — and that’s a good thing for succeeding in marketing today.

What other tools or apps do you use to create content more easily? Leave them in the comments so we can extend this list right here!

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in December 2013 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Read More »

Since cloud computing first gained mainstream attention around 2009, its popularity has exploded.

Promising increased efficiency, flexibility and cost-effectiveness, it was hailed as the ultimate business solution. This year, IDC predicted that CMOs will drive $32.3bn in marketing technology spending by 2018.

According to Sean Grimes, Director of IT services for Agilisys, “there is no denying that Cloud Technology is creating as much disruption as the dotcom boom”. But are users seeing the benefits?

What is a ‘marketing cloud’?

The marketing cloud is made up of a suite of cloud-based marketing tools covering analytics, targeting, social media management, audience management, customer experience and more. It can be used to track and measure customer data, keep tabs on individual users and automate time-consuming tasks.

It seems marketers are now beginning to recognise it as a viable alternative to traditional software. ‘What the hell is a marketing cloud, anyway?’, a new report by ClickZ Intelligence, surveyed nearly 200 marketing professionals to discover their thoughts on the marketing cloud. Over half (52%) of respondents claimed to be using marketing cloud technology, with another 27% saying they were considering using it.

Another 12% claimed not to know what the term ‘marketing cloud’ meant. Although the majority were already using the technology, this suggests there may be some confusion amongst marketers around the term ‘marketing cloud’ – backed up by interviews with senior client-side executives. Many were sceptical that the technology they used could be classed under the term ‘marketing cloud’. However, further investigation revealed that all were using vendors and products that fitted the survey’s definition – ‘an integrated suite of marketing tools which are available to marketers as web-based services offered by a software vendor’.

Does it work?

The question is: does this technology have a tangible effect on productivity and profitability? An overwhelming majority (82%) of respondents in the same survey said the marketing cloud had a positive impact on their organisation’s marketing, and 88% agreed that an integrated suite of marketing tools has a positive effect on business performance. Pete Markey, Director of Brand Communications & Marketing for Aviva, explained:

‘The right use of cloud technologies can transform capabilities in the marketing team. These tools help you get activity out faster and it changes the nature of people’s jobs. You spend a lot less time on grunt work so you can get on and make the most of your skill set.’

In this case, ‘grunt work’ can be massively reduced by marketing automation. Reducing the time spent on tasks which don’t directly contribute towards profitability – like administration and database management – means teams work efficiently and productively. It’s no surprise then, that 76% of marketing professionals in the survey that said marketing automation was either a ‘critical’ or ‘important’ element for a marketing suite.

Integrated or non-integrated?

Clearly, marketers value the marketing cloud, but getting it up and running isn’t always a smooth process. Before investing, businesses must first decide whether to use one vendor for an ‘integrated’ suite of marketing tools, or to rely on several different ones. Both have their pros and cons: integrated services offer more functionality and convenience, but tend to come with a higher cost. On the other hand, a ‘modular’ approach – where a business uses only the services they need, but provided by a variety of vendors – is often complex and difficult to manage.

How do marketing professionals see it? According to the report findings, ‘reducing complexity’ was the most important benefit of an integrated approach, with 44% of respondents citing it as an advantage. Integrated services provide a unified user interface, making data easier to access and interpret. They also enable staff in different departments to create campaigns, share information and collaborate more easily.

Ease of use was also ranked highly, with 24% valuing a single vendor point of contact.

Understandably, juggling multiple systems has the potential to become complex – especially when things go wrong. With an integrated marketing suite, the number of possible causes of any given problem are massively reduced. Nonetheless, a ‘modular’ approach, although more difficult to manage, can be appropriate to smaller companies that don’t require the broad functionality that an integrated service might offer.

The future?

It remains to be seen what the future holds for the marketing cloud. The market is still young, and it’s not clear what innovations are on the horizon. Only time will tell which vendors and services will win out. But the marketing cloud is certainly a growing force – one which marketers everywhere are beginning to consider.

 

To find out more, fill in the form below to download the full report. You’ll get the full results of ClickZ’s survey, an overview of the major vendors and what they offer, future predictions and key insights from senior marketers at brands including Aviva, Flight Centre and Westfield.

 

var data = {“action”:”get_marketo_form”,”form_id”:”1481″,”uniqid”:”585ada66cfbc7″,”form_args”:{“redirect_url”:””,”prefill”:true,”push_down”:”#subscribedtoCZSEWMasterMarketing”,”ty”:”PGJyIC8+ClRoYW5rIHlvdSEgV2UgaGF2ZSBqdXN0IHNlbnQgeW91IGFuIGVtYWlsIHdpdGggdGhlIGxpbmsgdG8geW91ciByZXBvcnQ8YnIgLz4K”,”lead”:[]}};
data.form_args.filter_value = getCookie(‘_mkto_trk’);
jQuery.post(
MyAjax.ajaxurl,
data,
function (response) {
jQuery(“.cnt-marketo-form-container-585ada66cfbc7”).html(response);
}
)

Read More »

Posted by MiriamEllis

In our ongoing quest for local prominence, are we leaving anybody out in the cold? For years, a fundamental message I’ve shared with almost every incoming local business client is that they need local SEO, specifically, because they need to be found on the web by local people. I’d estimate that 98% of everything our industry writes about is tied to this concept, and while this focus is sensible, today I’d like to highlight an underserved (but enormous) target local market: non-local people.

Consider these statistics:

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 40,093,000 residents move annually — averaging 14.19% of the population.
According to AAA, 35% of US families planned to take a vacation of 50+ miles in 2016.
According to the Global Business Travel Association, Americans took an estimated 488.1 million business trips in 2015 — that’s 1.3 million work-related trips happening every day of the year.

These numbers create a context in which there are literally millions of consumers arriving in unfamiliar towns on a daily basis, in need of a variety of local resources they’ll discover using the Internet. In this article, I’d like to help your local business get discovered with a welcoming, supplementary local SEO strategy based on the understanding that newcomers matter. We’re going to dive into location data management, attribution, and reviews, with an eye to newcomer needs.

What do newcomers really need?

Residents of your city or town have likely already established their favorite restaurant, grocery store, doctor, school, place of worship and pet supply shop. While there are certainly tactics you can employ for trying to edge out the competition to become someone’s new favorite destination, chances are good that longtime locals won’t have too much trouble actually locating you at 123 Main St. if you’re doing good, essential local SEO.

They already know where Main St. is in relationship to other streets, how long it will take to get there and, if they’re established neighbors, what the parking situation is like in that part of town.

Non-locals know none of this. Your city is a blank slate to them, and they’ll be using their desktop and mobile devices to start filling in that slate to create a picture of their destination, both before and after they arrive in town. If you’re not providing the necessary signals to foster transactions with newcomers, if they never learn that your local business exists, it’s a direct hit to your wallet, week after week, year after year.

Which types of local businesses need to appeal to new neighbors and travelers to avoid foregoing desirable revenue? Let’s break that down by industry:

As we can see, a significant number of industries can serve either new neighbors or travelers, and in some cases, both. Let’s look at three intelligent ways to put out the welcome mat for these important consumers.

1. Basic location data management

While settled residents may be able to parse out that your business is actually located on 5th Street rather than 5th Avenue when encountering inconsistent data about your company on the web, don’t expect newcomers to inuit this. Step one in welcoming this user group is to ensure that you’ve got your core name, address, and phone number (NAP) correct in two places:

A) Your website

For the single-location business, this should be easy. Audit every page and element (like the header and footer ) of your website where you mention any part of your NAP for accuracy. Correct any errors. Pay particular attention to your branding. Don’t be The Tree Restaurant on your Contact Us page, The Green Tree Restaurant on your About page, and Green Trees Cafe in your logo. You want to make a cohesive brand impression on your website so that consumers can clearly match it to your real-world signage as they drive through town.

For multi-location businesses, things are a little more complex. In addition to checking that NAP is correct on each of the landing pages you create for each location, be certain those pages are accessible via a well-functioning store locator widget which enables users to search by city (not just by zip code, as most newcomers will not know local zip codes).

B) Your local business listings

Hopefully you’re already engaging in active location data management of your local business listings/citations to help local consumers find you, but know that inconsistencies on major platforms could result in particularly heavy newcomer losses as users get misdirected, lost, and drift away, never to return.

You want a clear NAP dataset on the most important platforms, keeping in mind that even if a particular platform isn’t that popular in your own city, it may be significant in the regions from which newcomers hail. You can do a speedy citation health check for free using the Moz Check Listing tool, which audits your listings on foundational platforms like Google My Business, Bing, Apple Maps, Yelp, Facebook, etc. Correct any inaccurate data the tool surfaces for you, and back up this work with a manual check of any niche directories that apply to your city or industry.

If you find you’ve got significant inconsistencies, or have a large number of locations to manage, you may want to consider purchasing an automated location data management service like Moz Local.

Beyond basic NAP

In addition to managing the NAP on your website and citations, there are 5 elements that are crucial to ensuring newcomers connect with your business:

Driving directions
Be sure directions and map place markers are accurate on your major citations and, for newcomers, put additional effort into writing up the best possible set of driving directions on your website. Write them out coming from the four cardinal directions and be sure you are associating your business with any major local landmarks that are easily seen from the road. Alert consumers to the presence of hazardous road conditions they may encounter coming from a particular direction and offer detours or shortcuts. Don’t leave out how to navigate large shopping centers if you’re located in one.
Hours of operation
It’s especially important if your business has seasonal/holiday hours to ensure that you are updating all relevant pages of your website and all of your major local business listings to reflect this for newcomers. If your business is seasonal (like a farm stand or pumpkin patch), set your Google My Business hours when you open for business, and when your season closes, remove them so that they appear ‘un-set,’ with the plan to re-set them next open season. If you have special hours for Christmas or other holidays, follow these directions to avoid Google stamping your listings with a warning that the hours may be inaccurate.
Parking information
Urban parking can be so appallingly complicated that it has led to the launch of booking services like Parkwhiz, but be sure you’re detailing parking information on your own website, regardless of city size. Don’t forget RV parking accessibility for travelers, whether parking is free, or if paid, the forms of payment local meters/lots accept. Parking info can be especially helpful for people with health concerns, so if on-site parking is unavailable, estimate how far the consumer will have to walk to reach your destination. A lack of parking data once caused me to have climb over cement barriers in a split-level parking lot in search of a salad on a 90+ degree day — it would have been courteous for the grocery store to have saved me from this silly situation with clear directions.
Description
Google may have replaced their former owner-authorized business description display with their in-house custom description, but most other local business listing platforms still allow you to pen your own. To play to a newcomer audience, which may be forming a very fast impression from your listings via a mobile device, pack your descriptions with the most persuasive information you can think of to help them make a decision. Is it that you’re kid-friendly, carry a certain brand, won a best-in-city award? In the fewest words possible, highlight the most impactful elements of your business to connect with high conversion, targeted newcomers.
Forms of payment
Failing to inform travelers that your business is cash-only is a deal-breaker, and many major retailers now even refuse to accept checks (which can come as an inconvenient surprise to out-of-towners). Numerous local business listings enable you to specify forms of payment accepted, and you should also at least include a visual representation of supported transaction methods on your website. For your most sophisticated consumers, if you support digital wallets, Bitcoin, or other popular payment alternatives, be sure to highlight this fact.

I recommend that you give first priority to getting your basic location information into beautiful shape on your website and local business listings so that the process of finding your business is as foolproof as possible for newcomers. Now let’s look at some elements that can influence being chosen once you’ve been found.

2. Attribution

It’s no secret in the local SEO industry that Google, Yelp, and other powerhouses are now actively crowdsourcing attribution from reviewers, but if local business attributes are new to you, let’s summarize.

Basically, attributes are snippets of descriptive content that differentiate the nature or features of a given business. Some of the data in the previous section would actually be considered attributes, such as whether a business features free parking, accepts Apple Pay, or offers 24-hour services. In practice, attributes are valuable to search engines in helping them determine the relevance of a result to a given user, and they’re valuable to users in helping to make decisions about whether a specific business provides exactly what they’re seeking.

Significantly, in May of 2016, Google rolled out version 3.0 of the Google My Business API, a new feature of which is the ability for developers to directly add attributes to Google My Business listings. And, as the year closes out, many users are finally seeing promised attribute functionality within the Google My Business dashboard. We can take all this as a clear signal that Google is zooming in on attribution, which they base on business categories. While dashboard attribution is still limited as of writing this, I predict we’ll see it expanding in 2017.

To conceptualize the practical application of attributes, I find it’s helpful to imagine consumer personae. Let’s hypothesize that our restaurant franchise is hoping to win a transaction from a group of six travelers on a family vacation. They are on the road a bit late one evening near one of our locations and are hungry for supper:

Dad would be glad to find an all-you-can eat buffet.
Mom would love to hear some live music.
There are three children; one is gluten-intolerant, one is a vegetarian, and one is a toddler who needs a booster seat and can’t eat full portions.
Grandmother urges that they find a salad bar because everyone has been eating too much fast food on this trip.
The dog would prefer not to be left in the car all evening.

Look through this very abridged list of Google My Business API attributes applicable to restaurants to see if you can match them to the family members (hey, this is like a game!):

If some or all of these attributes describe our restaurant location, and we’ve either added them to Google My Business or are earning them from our reviewers on Google, Yelp, or Trip Advisor, we’re making a strong case for being shown as a relevant answer to the family’s search query, and to being chosen by them. Good start! But, I’d like to take the concept of attribution one step further as it relates to local SEO.

I’m not privy to the methodology Google used to come up with their extensive list of attributes for all sorts of business categories, but I’d invite local enterprises and agencies to view attributes as a fascinating roadmap to website content development. Imagine taking the above set of descriptors and writing something like this, in natural language, on the website landing page for our restaurant’s location in Santa Fe:

What we’ve done here is to take Google’s attribute hints as to what consumers are looking for and have turned them into a statement that helps a newcomer make a quick, informed mobile decision (call it a ‘micro-moment’ and you’re really being cool!).

For thoroughness, I would recommend combining Google’s attributes with those you are personally prompted to enter when leaving your own reviews on various platforms, and fine-tune it all based on your unique expertise drawn from serving your customer base. It could be that a driving motivation for newcomers to your city and business would be proximity to a point-of-interest, accepting mobile payments, or serving organic food. Think of attributes as clues from search engines, review sites, and directories that you can pass along to customers to qualify your business as the answer to their needs.

Finally, I’d like to take the exploration of attributes one step further. I reached out to TouchPoint Digital Marketing owner, David Deering, who is one of our industry’s foremost experts on local business Schema. I asked if there was a direct relationship between attributes and Schema, and he explained:

“Unfortunately schema.org does not have corresponding properties and values for local business attributes. But there are ways to mark them up anyway. Some are rather straightforward and others take a little more coding but they all can be marked up in one way or another.
Schema.org recently added the “amenityFeature” property for the Place type (which includes the LocalBusiness type) and for LodgingBusiness of which Hotel is a subtype of. So a local business can do something like this to say that it offers free parking, free wifi, that it’s wheelchair accessible and so on:

“amenityFeature”: [
{
“@type”: “LocationFeatureSpecification”,
“name”: “Free Parking”,
“value”: “True”
},
{
“@type”: “LocationFeatureSpecification”,
“name”: “Free WiFi”,
“value”: “True”
},
{
“@type”: “LocationFeatureSpecification”,
“name”: “Wheelchair Accessible”,
“value”: “True”
},
{
“@type”: “LocationFeatureSpecification”,
“name”: “Serves Breakfast”,
“value”: “True”
},
{
“@type”: “LocationFeatureSpecification”,
“name”: “Has All-You-Can-Eat Buffet”,
“value”: “True”
}
],

By the way, that is the structure that would need to be used if a business was marking up more than one amenity or attribute.
A hotel could also do something like this to mark up the fact that they have an indoor swimming pool that is open everyday from 7 AM to 10 PM. It’s possible that a similar structure could be used to mark up, say, Happy Hour (I guess that depends if a restaurant’s Happy Hour could be considered an “amenity” or not. I’m not sure.).

“amenityFeature”: {
“@type”: “LocationFeatureSpecification”,
“name”: “Indoor Swimming Pool”,
“hoursAvailable”: [
{
“@type”: “OpeningHoursSpecification”,
“dayOfWeek”: <a href=”http://schema.org/Sunday”>”http://schema.org/Sunday”</a>,
“opens”: “07:00:00”,
“closes”: “22:00:00”
},
{
“@type”: “OpeningHoursSpecification”,
“dayOfWeek”: <a href=”http://schema.org/Monday”>”http://schema.org/Monday”</a>,
“opens”: “07:00:00”,
“closes”: “22:00:00”
},
{
“@type”: “OpeningHoursSpecification”,
“dayOfWeek”: <a href=”http://schema.org/Tuesday”>”http://schema.org/Tuesday”</a>,
“opens”: “07:00:00”,
“closes”: “22:00:00”
},
{
“@type”: “OpeningHoursSpecification”,
“dayOfWeek”: <a href=”http://schema.org/Wednesday”>”http://schema.org/Wednesday”</a>,
“opens”: “07:00:00”,
“closes”: “22:00:00”
},
{
“@type”: “OpeningHoursSpecification”,
“dayOfWeek”: <a href=”http://schema.org/Thursday”>”http://schema.org/Thursday”</a>,
“opens”: “07:00:00”,
“closes”: “22:00:00”
},
{
“@type”: “OpeningHoursSpecification”,
“dayOfWeek”: <a href=”http://schema.org/Friday”>”http://schema.org/Friday”</a>,
“opens”: “07:00:00”,
“closes”: “22:00:00”
},
{
“@type”: “OpeningHoursSpecification”,
“dayOfWeek”: <a href=”http://schema.org/Saturday”>”http://schema.org/Saturday”</a>,
“opens”: “07:00:00”,
“closes”: “22:00:00”
}
],

And schema.org does have a direct and simple way to mark up the fact that a restaurant accepts reservations and whether or not smoking is allowed. It would simply be:
“acceptsReservations”: “True”,
“smokingAllowed”: “False”, The same goes for if a hotel or lodging business allows pets:
“petsAllowed”: “True”,
Now how much of this Google and the other search engines will use, it’s hard to say. But it certainly can’t hurt for a business to mark up their attributes and amenities on their site. If a website’s markup matches the attributes they’ve included on their Google My Business listing, I think that can only help. And we never know what Google will begin pulling out of a site’s structured data to use for something, so I stick by my motto: Mark up as much as possible and be as thorough as possible.”

In sum, in markets where you are looking for a competitive edge, exploration of thorough Schema amenity markup can dovetail, and might sometimes even correlate, with attribution development, enabling you to define features of your business is way your competitors may be overlooking.

3. Reviews

Here on the Moz Blog, we’ve previously discussed the vital importance of giving special treatment to reviews and testimonials on your website. And, as for reviews on third-party websites, I’m going to make a guess that you’ve already seen studies like this one indicating that a whopping 92% of consumers now read online reviews. Most recently, we’ve covered how to make maximum use of the owner response function available on many review platforms as a form of customer service, reputation management, and free marketing.

But there’s a subject we haven’t yet broached regarding reviews that is highly relevant to serving newcomers, and which recently came up in an exchange I had with Phil Rozek surrounding his excellent article, If Nobody in Your Area Cares About Yelp, Should You Still Bother Getting Reviews There?.

Phil brainstormed 7 great reasons for caring about review giant Yelp, including the visibility of Yelp in-SERP stars for your brand searches in Google, and the fact that Yelp feeds reviews to a number of other important platforms like Apple Maps and Bing Places. What I added to Phil’s list is that, even if Yelp isn’t big in your town, it may be huge in the cities from which your newcomer customers hail.

Surveys have repeatedly cited that Yelp is a much bigger deal on the coasts than in the interior United States. Yet, imagine a large hotel located within 3 miles of the newly-built Minnesota Viking’s U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis. Local people may not be leaving a ton of Yelp reviews of this hotel. Now, imagine that the San Francisco 49ers (having a MUCH different season than this one) are playing in the NFC Championship game at U.S. Bank Stadium on their way to Superbowl glory. San Franciscans are about to pour into Minneapolis, and they’ll be looking at Yelp in extraordinary proportions to find a hotel. If our hypothetical lodging facility has neglected Yelp because it’s no big deal in their home city, they could be losing out on a very lucrative moment.

This scenario is applicable to all third-party review platforms and all relevant local businesses located near major points-of-interest or event sites. This past summer, Wesley Young used his hometown of Frisco, TX to estimate that that 33% of local commerce was generated by non-locals. Meanwhile, here’s an interesting map of the places Americans were moving to and from in 2016. I would recommend that all local businesses consider gathering intel as to the cities that send them the most newcomers, and the review platforms most used in those cities of origin, to be sure a strong reputation is being developed there.

Completing the welcome

In addition to utilizing local business listing data management, attribute-driven website content, and city-of-origin review management to attract newcomers, here are a few more things you can do to round out the welcome message:

If you’ve discovered that certain cities tend to send your city of location a significant amount of newcomers, geotarget paid advertising to be shown to that demographic.
Your resident local customers may have the leisure to research your business from their desktop computers, but most of your traveling customers will be on their mobile devices. The quality of the mobile experience your website provides is especially critical to this user group.
Most good-sized towns and nearly all cities have welcome centers or tourism boards, many of which produce print materials for visitors. Consider advertising in these publications if your industry is included in my above infographic on local needs. And, if you print your own brochures, seek to have them included in the lobbies of as many local hotels and other businesses as possible.
Consider offering a new neighbor discount if you’d like to capture this demographic. Businesses like the Welcome Wagon have been facilitating this form of advertising for almost a century. Or, be your own welcoming committee utilizing both print and social media to promote one-time discounts for new homeowners in your area.
Look for tie-in opportunities with other local businesses. If our hypothetical family of 6 vacationers dines at Salsa Roja restaurant, could your auto garage, pottery shop, or swim center advertise on the back of the menu, alerting the family to your existence for tomorrow’s things-to-do agenda? How about getting a coupon code included in that ad, or doing some other form of cross-promotion with the restaurant?
Speaking of things-to-do, realize opportunities for publishing best-in-city guides to a particular subject that ties into your business model. For example, a gift shop specializing in nature-themed merchandise near a state or national park could write a wild bird guide listing species to be spotted in the area. A gym could publish a guide to the healthiest restaurants in the city or the best places to run. A pediatrician could write about fun places to take kids in their town. A cell phone store could map out areas of highest connectivity in a rural area. A key benefit to this type of relational topic development will be brand discovery by new neighbors and travelers while they are engaging with the useful content.

If your business is tourism-based (like a hotel chain), it’s likely you are already implementing most of these techniques, but it’s my hope that this article will have helped many more industries consider how crafting an appeal to new or non-locals is both applicable and savvy.

At the opening of this piece, I called this a ‘supplemental’ local SEO strategy, to be implemented as appropriate in addition to all you are already doing well to serve your resident population. The amount of resources you devote to this supplemental effort should be based on a) research as to the number of newcomers and tourists your city receives annually and b) the need for your business to distance itself from competitors with a superior effort.

If your findings are good and your need to compete is strong, why not make 2017 the year you extend a well-planned welcome to your share of those millions of consumers who will be on the move?

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Read More »

The end of the year is closing in, which means you’ll be seeing dozens of articles similarly titled to this one. Some will even take the bold stance, luring in readers with catchy headlines like, “CONTENT MARKETING IS DEAD” or “SOCIAL MEDIA IS A WASTE OF YOUR TIME.” But contrary to what these articles would have you believe, few marketing strategies really ever die out completely. Rather, they simply become a less efficient use of your time.

Of course, there are exceptions (cough, Vine, cough), but for the most part, no one can tell you what’s going to be “out” in 2017. Different online platforms and the marketing strategies that fuel them are constantly evolving, just like the preferences and behavior patterns of users collectively. There’s no telling which marketing tactics will make a comeback. There are, however, some not-so-surprising things you can probably go ahead and strike off your to-do list in 2017.

Working for clicks over conversions.

This should be obvious, because clicks are nice, but conversions are better. This is especially important for those investing in any kind of paid search optimization/campaigning, because money is at stake. Above all else, your priority should be to get users to take a certain action (making a purchase, entering contact information, whatever).

Instead of optimizing with the goal of enticing clicks, try and think more holistically about an approach that will have an end result of conversions. Start by addressing common things that hold back conversions, like web design or a poor landing page. Then see that your conversion strategy aligns with your target audience. Whatever you do, don’t waste your time thinking mere clicks are the key to success.

Emphasizing quantity or quality.

Just. Don’t. Do it. Yes, having tons of content can make it seem like you have a surplus of resources on your website, but if they’re all low quality, you’re wasting your time. Having hundreds of pages of thin content will not only not help you get the kind of user engagement you need, but it’s also punishable. Plus, why would you even want to seem spammy?

Your focus should be on quality, original content that contributes to a positive user experience. Google does everything with user experience in mind, and so should you, because that’s the kind of thing that gets rewarded on search engines. In 2017, make quality the focus of your content marketing strategy. Go back and look at where you may have dropped the ball on quality in 2016, and strategize ways to do better going forward.

Avoiding mobile-first/mobile-ready optimization and design.

At this point, if you’re still avoiding mobile optimization, you’re just willfully choosing to set yourself back. Mobile optimization is an undeniable component of browsing behavior, and your participation is required if you want to remain competitive. The good news is that the shift to mobile is so significant that Google has made it pretty easy to switch over to a mobile-first design.

PPC, Google’s expanded text ads that rolled out in August took care of mobile-preferred ads, so now one ad format adjusts across all devices. To thrive through 2017, all you really need to do is make your website mobile-friendly and ensure that it’s locally optimized.

Read More »

With “near me” mobile moments surging, contributor Jon Schepke contends that brands must use the context of location across all their search marketing efforts — paid, earned and owned.

The post Uncovering the white spaces of opportunity for local search appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Read More »

Those involved in the Google Contributor program are receiving emails stating the service is shutting down in January 2017.

The post Google Contributor Program to Shut Down in January 2017 by @MattGSouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

Read More »